The Wooden Staircase

What I found in the Louro mountains, seven years ago

I've been working as a forestry technician in the province of A Coruña for fifteen years. I'm saying this right off the bat so it's clear what kind of person I am: someone who spends six to eight hours a day out in the countryside, wearing leather boots, carrying a GPS and inventory forms, with a mindset that's really not prone to dramatics. I've found things that, out of context, might seem unsettling. Animals dead in strange positions. Half-finished abandoned buildings, scaffolding still up. Lost hikers who'd been wandering for days. Skeletons that turned out to be wild boar, or cow, and once, a person—though that was a documented, closed mountain accident case. For everything I've found, I've always, or almost always, had an explanation. I work in environments that people from the city tend to romanticize. I see it for what it is: classified forest land, UTM grid coordinates, coverage percentages, fire hazard indexes. I'm not the jumpy type.

Seven years ago, I was doing a natural regeneration survey in a dense pine forest area above the Louro reservoir, in the Muros region. It was October, a Wednesday morning, nothing special. The pine forest was second-growth, a plantation from the fifties, with a fair amount of gorse undergrowth and ferns. An area hardly anyone visits because it's not interesting for hikers or hunting. I'd been working alone for about three hours, doing my sampling plots every two hundred meters, jotting down data on pine and oak regrowth in a waterproof notebook.

I saw it when I came out of a dense thicket into a small clearing. At first, I didn't know what it was. My brain took a couple of seconds to process the image because it was completely out of place. A wooden staircase. Free-standing, just standing there, not attached to anything. Twelve steps, I counted them later, ascending in a northeasterly direction to a height of about seven feet. The top step just ended in mid-air. There was no wall. No structure. No ruins, no foundation, no sign that a building had ever been there.

I walked closer. The wood was chestnut or oak—I'm not a carpenter, so I can't say for sure—but it was a dense, high-quality hardwood. The steps were fitted with mortise joints, no nails. The whole thing looked old, but its state of preservation made no sense given the Galician climate. That area gets over sixty inches of rain a year. The wood should have been rotting. It was dry. I tapped it with the handle of my pruning saw. A solid sound. No hollow spots, no sign of woodworms, no rot fungus.

I took pictures. I have a Garmin with a built-in camera and snapped fifteen or twenty shots from different angles. I marked the coordinates on the GPS. Then I just stood there staring at it for a while—hard to say how long, but longer than normal. I climbed the first three steps. The staircase held my weight without any issue, no creaking, no give. From the third step, the view was the same as always: pine forests, scrubland, the reservoir in the distance through the trees. The fourth step felt like too much. I climbed back down.

That same Thursday, I told two coworkers about it at the office. I showed them the photos. Their reactions were pretty much what you'd expect: maybe someone put it there for some reason, maybe some artist, maybe some eccentric with too much time on their hands. My section chief, when I put it in the incident report, literally told me: someone probably put it there for some purpose and then left it. It's not our problem if it's not in a specially protected area. And the area wasn't. Case closed, administratively speaking.

Two weeks later, I went back. Not for work, but because I couldn't get it out of my head. I went on a Saturday morning, alone, in my own boots, on my own time. I had the exact coordinates. I got to the clearing. The ground was covered in pine needles, just like always. The staircase wasn't there. No marks on the ground, no sign of removed lumber, no indication that anyone had been there at all. The pine needles in the clearing showed no disturbed areas, no footprints, no grooves. It was as if the staircase had never existed.

That was seven years ago. I hardly told anyone. I don't know what I saw. I have no explanation for it, and I'm honest enough to admit that. I've had this thing stuck in my head for seven years, not really knowing what to do with it. I'm posting this today because something else happened this week.

This week

On Tuesday, we were doing a wind-damage assessment in a eucalyptus plantation north of Carnota. There were two of us: me and Sam, who's been with the service for five years and is just as down-to-earth as I am. We were on a quad bike on a forest track that had been opened three years ago for forestry work, an area neither of us knew particularly well because it wasn't in our usual sectors. It's about twenty miles as the crow flies from where I was seven years ago.

Sam was in front. He stopped the quad suddenly, making me brake too. He got off without a word. I leaned out and followed him. He'd left the track and gone about sixty feet into the woods, dodging fallen trunks. When I caught up to him, I found him standing there with his arms crossed, staring straight ahead.

A wooden staircase. Different from the first one: narrower, with fewer steps, maybe eight or nine, and made of a lighter-colored wood I couldn't identify. But the same impossible logic: freestanding, no structure, leading up to nothing. The top step about six feet off the ground, ending in mid-air among eucalyptus branches.

Sam said to me: what the hell is that? And I didn't say anything for a moment. Then I said: I don't know. I pulled out my phone and started taking pictures. Sam did too. He was thinking out loud, running through possibilities: an art installation, private property with some kind of aesthetic whim, remnants of some kind of unseen structure. I didn't say anything about the previous time. I don't know why, but I didn't. We marked the coordinates, tied a fluorescent orange marker flag to a nearby tree so we could find the spot easily on the way back, and continued with the inspection.

Forty minutes later, coming back along the same track, we stopped at the spot where we'd left the marker. It was still on the tree. We went back into the woods. The eucalyptus ground, with its layer of shed bark and leaves, was undisturbed. There was nothing there. The staircase had vanished. Sam was quiet for a few seconds. Then he said: did we mark it right? And I told him yes, the GPS coordinates were the same, the marker was the same, we were exactly where we'd been forty minutes earlier. He searched for a while. Checked the surrounding area. Nothing.

Sam doesn't have words for what he saw. He told me on the drive back, in that way people talk when they're processing something that doesn't fit into any framework: it doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense—he repeated it several times. I'm posting the photos I took with my phone on Tuesday. They're bad photos, with poor light filtering through the eucalyptus, but you can see the staircase.

Tonight, I did something I didn't do seven years ago. I took the coordinates of the two sightings and drew a straight line between them. Then I extended it in both directions. To the south, the line enters the Louro reservoir and, if you continue it under the water, points toward the center of the reservoir basin, which was flooded in 1963. There was a town there. I looked it up: the village of Gures, forty-two registered residents in the 1960 census, evicted by eminent domain in 1962. I don't know if that means anything. I don't know if straight lines on a map have any real significance or if I'm just building a narrative where there's nothing but coincidence.

What I do know is this: I've worked for fifteen years in the forests of this province. I've covered thousands of miles of forest tracks. I've done inventories, marking, pruning, firefighting, drawn up management plans. I know the countryside in a functional, pragmatic, demystified way. And there's something in that area that doesn't fit into any category I have. Something that appears and disappears. Something shaped like a staircase that leads nowhere.

I don't go to that part of the woods alone anymore.